dreamstate writing 3 April 2017

(After my pre-dawn qigong practice I had crawled back into bed, at which point these dreams occurred. It had had been a difficult, trying practice, the right side of my brain raging and intrusive.)

I was sitting with a blonde-haired girl on a concrete sidewalk next to an asphalted motorway. We were on the top of a low hill. It was bright, daytime; the sky was blue. Brick structures stood across the road to our front left and farther down the rise to our right rear. Walking paths had been worn into the scrub grasses that covered the now-empty lots around us where buildings had once stood. My bicycle lay in the grass behind us, and some part me remembers having just left a cluster of abandoned and crumbling single-storey buildings somewhere nearby.

A person drove past in a rocket-powered sled of some sort, gunning the engine to maintain speed. Though it was a warm spring day there was still enough snow on the motorway to allow the the sled to slide along quickly, without its steel skis kicking up sparks. I pointed it out to my companion, who seemed nonplussed, saying something like “Oh yeah, that’s a...” (I forget the name she used for the contraption.)

The next thing I remember was being in a house with colorful walls, watching a couple - a man and woman I knew well - getting ready to venture forth on an outing. They bustled back and forth within the large kitchen where I too stood, gathering things and talking to each other in quiet, friendly tones. Bright, golden light streamed into their abode from windows set into its thick outer walls to my left, warming the parquet flooring and wooden kitchen furniture. To my right was an inner wall painted an earthy red. The two were dressed in mismatched but colorful clothing, leggings and long-sleeved undershirts under shorts and t-shirts. Both wore what appeared to be straw hats with bandanas tied around their chins to keep the hats in place. They vacated the structure through a door to my rear, leaving me behind. I went to a cupboard at the far end of the room where I knew I would find a vacuum-sealed coffee thermos and a rolled up yoga-mat. The items were indeed there. I spoke with a companion, the blonde-haired girl perhaps, explaining something to her as I took out the items. I remembered, then, that I had similar items elsewhere, and put them carefully back into the cupboard.

Realizing that I had other places to be, I exited into an inner courtyard with red walls. Rectangular stones paved the courtyard, which was littered with wheeled contraptions, ancient wooden pushcarts perhaps. As I was walking toward the gate that led to the outside, I passed under a broad arch that led to the exit. In the adobe above my head, directly in the center of the arch, was an opening that appeared to have been hastily-patched with a rusted ventilation register, into which I peered, finding however little of interest.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑

few options remain

A man encourages his friends to purge their lives of sadness and hatred, but despite his best efforts, little positive change occurs. For his troubles, he is badmouthed and tattled on, ridiculed and mocked. He realizes his mistake and tries to keep his mouth shut, but it is too late – he stops voicing his opinion but gets yelled at for raising his eyebrows in what is seen as a rude and derogatory fashion. Keeping the area around his eyes as neutral as possible, he tries to free his mind of the hatred boiling around him by breathing out the stress, anger, and malcontentedness he hears spewing from his quasi-adoptive family. Its mother yells at him only occasionally, but, in her anger, she reveals that she has been keeping track of his every transgression, repeating them to herself over and over until they erupt as violent and uncontrollable rage.

It has reached the point where his breathing insults the matriarch – she just recently accused him of belittling her by exhaling disdainfully while she was listing her mother's past failures and speaking poorly about her supposedly best friend. If he tries to ignore the woman's negativity and not listen to the sadnesses she repeats, she yells at him for not listening to her and scolds him for ignoring everything she says. He has been backed into a corner; few options remain. If he keeps spending time with them, he shall have to be very careful of the way he speaks, looks, and breathes, lest someone take affront to his actions. If he continues coming around, he shall have to choose between sitting stone-faced and mute with neutral body-language and a mind free of both attachment and aversion or grinning with abject glee at everything that is said and shouting approvingly at even the slightest move, nod, glance, smile, and blink.

He prefers neither option: he shall simply stay away and stop hanging with the family in question; he would rather spend his life in quiet and honest solitude than in loud company that simmers with anguished self-deception. If one lives life enslaved to the demands of the ego, if one cannot evaluate oneself honestly at regular intervals, if one prefers the stupor of ignorance to the clarity that humility affords, then one will have a hard time adapting to the changing realities of life, preferring holding on to letting go, closing off to throwing open, shedding tears of rage to those of joy. At some point, one must weigh the benefits of human interaction against those of solitude, and if the stress and sadness that comes from hanging out with certain people is greater than the joy and contentedness their presence affords, one stays away. The main lesson the author has learned is that no matter what he says or how hard he tries, he cannot save other people from their own egos, change the way they interpret life events, or influence them in a positive manner. He heard a saying recently, one that has stuck with him: If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. It is time to find a new room.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

do unto others

I do not hate the bible, nor do I hate Christians or their religion, but I cannot stand people who gloss over its parts that talk about loving one another and who focus instead on their faith's sinister aspects, such as those demanding that gays be killed (Leviticus 20:13 NAB) and prostitutes be banished (Leviticus 21:9 NAB), persecuted and murdered in the name of god YHWH, Christianity's supreme deity, greater even than Mary, or Yeshua. Matthew, a man who wrote long after the death of Yeshua (if he existed at all), says in the Christian bible's new testament, basically, that what people do to each other, they do to YHWH, their god. Put a different way, Matt is trying to tell people to do unto others as they would have done unto themselves.

Oh what a peaceful and happy world this would be if professed Christians would but hew to this code, treat others as they themselves would prefer to be treated, understand that America was not founded on their faith, mind their own business, and stop trying to ban gay marriage and a woman's right to the contents of her stomach. If we lived in such a world, we would have fewer doctors being killed by Christian extremists, fewer politicians currying the favor (Defense of Marriage) of homegrown Taliban-style Christians (dominionists), and, perhaps, lower levels of industrial pollution, self-neglect, laziness, and materialism. (I am merely speculating that an interpretation of the Christian bible based on a love for the natural world and a respect for the tender fragility of the human spirit, one rooted in humility and moderation and founded on the notion that the godhead resides within each and every one of us and not in a mythical palace in the clouds, that such an interpretation would trump the many of the current interpretations, those being very similar to the hard-line and murderous views espoused by Islamic terrorists who deny women's rights and destroy anything that violates their strict religious codes.) As things stand, however, today's more prominent Christian leaders – similar to their counterparts in al-Qaida and Hezbollah – preach hatred for the unusual, fear of all things strange, unwavering obedience to codes designed for a nomadic Bronze Age desert-people, and discrimination against anyone living a life other than one of gasoline-guzzling, television-watching, Jesus-praising lethargy. How do we convince the Christians to stop their assault on the Liberty of the rest of us Americans? How do we show them just how anti-American are their efforts to restrict the freedoms of women and gays? For a religion that prides itself on its dozens of so-called saints – persons discriminated against and killed because of their faith – Christianity has made a remarkable and shocking about-face; now, it is the Christians who discriminate against and persecute others for their beliefs; now, it is the Christians calling for our nation to be smothered by religious laws similar to those that might exist under a globe-spanning Islamic Caliphate.

If the efforts of today's Christians to force the rest of us to live by the rules of their god YWHW are what they see as doing unto others as they would have done unto themselves, perhaps we who do not share their faith should give them a taste of their own medicine and drive them bodily into the sea, fighting fire with fire; perhaps we should ban their rituals and costumes and force them to live in constant fear of repression, hatred, ridicule, and physical battery, much as they do to our homosexual fellow Americans. We non-Christians, though, are Liberty-loving individuals who mind our own business and who don't care if two men want to marry one another; having fought for centuries to bring about equality and justice, we shall not allow a few thousand bible-thumping lunatics to ruin the fun for everyone else – not on this whorphan's watch, at least. No, friend, we champions of freedom would never infringe upon the inalienable rights of other adults to enter into contracts or agreements that are to their liking. We keep our minds free and our heads on swivels, fighting religious oppression wherever it should rear its ugly head. Mahalo.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit